Mylan pushed for law to make EpiPens mandatory in US schools — then fled overseas to avoid taxes

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch (Fortune Live Media/Flickr)

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch (Fortune Live Media/Flickr)

EpiPen is the brand name of an device that makes it easy to inject a pre-measured dose of epinephrine (adrenaline), most often for the treatment of anaphylaxis.

  1. Mylan, the manufacturer of the EpiPen, spent $4 million lobbying Congress to pass the 2013 School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act
  2. The Act offers incentives to schools to stock the potentially life-saving EpiPen
  3. After the law was passed, 11 states mandated that their schools stock EpiPens
  4. Your tax dollars help pay for many of the EpiPens — through incentives (see #2, above), mandates (see #3, above), purchases by the Veterans Administration, reimbursements by Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as reimbursements by the health plans of state and local governments
  5. Having established a healthy demand for their product, Mylan did a “corporate inversion” in 2015, that converted them from a US company into a Dutch company, so they no longer pay any US taxes
  6. Not content with screwing us on taxes, Mylan jacked up the price of the EpiPen from $104 (2009) to $609 (2016)

But it’s not all bad news, Heather Bresch, the Mylan CEO has at least been compensated for her hard work on behalf of the company’s customers: her salary has gone from $4.9 million (2009) to $13.1 million (2015 — most recent year for which figures are available).

Source: Mylan pushed for law to make EpiPens mandatory in US schools — then fled overseas to avoid taxes

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